As You’ve Probably Noticed…

…the site’s been down for the past couple of days. I managed to put up a maintenance message for a good part of time, but for those who missed it, the server had a hardware issue that required some emergency maintenance. The short story is that the hard drive was failing. To make matters worse, the RAID-1 mirrored drive that’s supposed to have me covered in this situation actually failed back in July without my knowledge, which left the site running on a single faulty drive that needed to be backed up and swapped out immediately so that both drives could be replaced.

With the help of Mentar and his friend Fruit, I managed to get a full up-to-date backup of the site, so nothing was lost — not even a single comment — unlike the crash we had back in the day on Aniblogger. It took me longer than I would’ve liked to reconfigure the server with a new Debian (Squeeze) distro, but everything should be up and running now. I expect there to be some hiccups, so please let me know if you encounter any issues (performance or otherwise). Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Note: Expect a flurry of posts to be published, as the writers have been staying on top of things during the downtime.

Lol. I feel for you. But I identify; I must be the only person who pre-purchased the game months ago and forwent every beta weekend and early access, forgetting about the game altogether until I saw people talking about it on release day. Things happen, RL business gets in the way-, etc… ；_・

The down time really scared me since I thought you guys were closing the site down. This is my favorite anime blog site and it is one that I share with my friends and family so I am glad to hear that this site is back up.

Even a day without Random Curiosity can cause major withdrawal symptoms such as an urge to discuss anime with anything resembling a humanoid, the impulse to write down various comments on yourselves in permanent markers and/or the violent crave for various anime opinions from a ‘Divine’ source.

I want to sincerely thank you all for contributing your precious time and energy in keeping the site alive and running for all us anime enthusiasts out there. A great deal of the shows I watch depends on the feedbacks by the RC community. The debates and discussions here are always enjoyable to participate and I really appreciate how respectful (most of the time) the RC community are towards other’s opinions, even though they may not necessarily agree with it.

I’ve been with RC since 2008 and I’m damn proud to call myself a member of RC. Stay strong and I’m looking forward to y’all future works!

But yeah now that I’ve calmed down a bit, here’s something with a more serious tune.

First off, thanks for that comment, really. If there’s one thing that keeps us going, it’s knowing that well, we’re making our own small difference so to speak. And to see you guys come in, day in day out, reading our posts, keeping the site alive, returning so quickly after the site’s been restored… we can’t ask for any better viewers than the ones we already have here for the most part. So in that context, we should actually be thanking you guys more than anything, because without you guys, there would be no site, and no real purpose in writing all of the posts we do… well aside from the enjoyment and w/e, but you know what I mean. So yeah, I know we say this a lot, especially in the podcasts recently, but I don’t think it’s something we can emphasize enough, so thank you. Thanks for all your support, your comments, your best wishes. And hopefully you’ll stick with us for years and years to come!

Glad the sites finally back online. Waiting expectantly for all the backlogged reviews, hoping they’ll be coming in fast and furious, especially for Horizon. I want to make sense of last weeks episode and soon as possible, so Stilts, no pressure ehh? :D

We love you oh Mentar and Mentar’s friend Fruit, oh unsung heroes we will sadly probably never see in person to thank for your efforts!

“Because they’re the heroes RC deserves, and the ones it needs right now… and so we’ll hunt down blown up hard drives and servers because we can. Because they’re true heroes. They’re silent guardians, watchful protectors of our technological foundations…dark knights!”

Lol I don’t know where you’re getting that feeling from, but uhh, okay.

The implication was it’s obvious the site needs Divine to get up in the end, so the thanks is implied, especially coming from a staff member. Also, it was a bit of messing around on part as well with the “:P” added on. Thus, something not meant to be taken nearly as seriously as you did.

What I was trying to point out was my appreciation for Mentar and Fruit, who don’t usually come here to assist, did so anyway, but probably won’t get as much appreciation, which isn’t right imo.

Yay! I was getting a little worried about the outage (I don’t know where the server is located and there is a tropical storm/hurricane bearing down on parts of the US right now) so I’m glad it was just a hardware problem, and everyone’s fine (…or I hope everyone is, I don’t know how many RC contributors live in the Gulf area. If there are, hope you guys are doing okay! >_<)

She lives!. ‘grats on getting everything revived Divine~ And many thanks to all the others involved in the recovery efforts >D!. Now to catch up on all those reviews written while the site was down :D!.

Look here, you downvoters, it’s not like I’m criticizing Divine or the site or anything, I’m merely objectively pointing out a problem!

I genuinely don’t understand how that should warrant so many downvotes!

I have said it once and I will continue saying it as long as it continues to be a problem: This voting system needs to be modified, if not scrapped altogether, as people can’t post in peace without being discouraged by suddenly getting downvoted for no particular reason.

frag85, I’m not one to complain about people disagreeing with what I say in episode threads, but I find it extremely befuddling that they could “disagree” with something as neutral as an error report, that’s what ticks me.

So forget it, to those downvoters who downvoted me on this senseless issue: FUCK YOU.

I can think of no other reason besides you guys having some ax to grind with me and trying to “troll” me by making me upset about it. So go ahead. Downvote away. I won’t be coming back to this thread.

Or, y’know, it could be that since we haven’t learned to digitalize inflections, your written observation sounds like petty whining; to me, it honestly does especially given the extra work Divine pulled to restore the years worth of data. Particularly, this phrase “..the second being sent JUST before the damn site crashed” coupled with your closing sentence. The caps on ‘just’ and the adjective ‘damn’ added, while probably placed as a harmless exaggeration on your part, easily changes the perceived mood of your statement.

Though if it makes you feel any better, I’m sure a couple of bandwagon members did jump in as soon as they saw a downvote. “Hurr, hurr~! Down with the whiner~!” and all that~

On a final, less-serious (an exaggeration)note… the “trolls” have overcome you! You just got lynched by anonymous downvoters! Nyahahahaha~!

Gasp! What is this? Divine revealing that he is human just like all of us? What sorcery!

Seriously though, I wouldn’t mind if comments got deleted while bringing this site back to life so long as all the posts return. I’ve been using this site as reference for old (and sometimes new) anime that I missed before picking them up.

That you managed to restore most of everyone’s comments is very commendable. Thank you for what was likely a monster of unpaid work!

Ah no, I meant the 3rd drive will be used as hot spare for the RAID-1 (avoiding the tax on parity calculations when in RAID-5). It’s pricey but a good investment especially for hosting one of the most popular anime blog sites out there :)

Back in the day when I was a sever admin. I hated raid-1 so much grrr. Just my two cents. Load OS in a raid 1 (for fast performance) and mount a raid-5 (for data storage with a hot spare) not the best performance but really worth the peace of mind. YEs they are expensive. Let’s open a donation fund to get one. I’m willing to donate since I was so depressed during the down time I thought I’ll die!!!
There’s so many of us here that come for our anime fix that it should worth a try.

Whew! Glad everything is alright! I was also getting worried since this is one of my main sites that I read frequently since the very beginning (2004?). Technical difficulties is never fun though. It’s also annoying when the preventative plan you have set in place failed without your knowledge while you continue to go on with your life believing that if anything happens, there’s backup. Anyways yah!

Who here was checking the site twice or three times a day to see if it came back on? I know I was. When it first went down the first thought I had was actually if a hd drive crashed or something, biggest reason for that was because if the site was going to go down I’m sure divine or someone else woulda have let us know. I’ve been an RC fan since the days if omni and I hope that this site keeps on living for a long time. Thank you to all the bloggers for having the same interests in anime that we also have.

Had a similar issue at my job where we had a server that running a RAID 5 with Hotspare. Two out of four drives failed…since 2009. Nobody knew and the we found out by accident because of an another issue on the box. Double HD failures suck!!!

It’s good to see Random Curiosity back. This blog has been my source for reviews for years, and many series that I’ve watched I have watched solely because an episode review here made it sound interesting. I also love to see the reviews of series I am already watching, to see what you folks’ expert eyes may have noticed in an episode that I did not, or just to see if you can better articulate your feelings on an episode than I can.

It was disconcerting to ahve the site down for a few days like this, but given the nature of the problem it is quite a pleasant surprise that you managed to get it back up and running so quickly, and without any data loss. Thank you for all your hard work, and I hope all of you can keep this blog going for quite some time yet to come.

I’ve got a number of servers with RAID setups (mostly RADI-1) running Centos 6, and they’re all set up to email me when something bad happens to the RAID setup. I’ve never used Debian before, so I don’t know for sure, but I imagine there’s some kind of system that can be set up to notify you via email in the event that the RAID goes bad.

Also, gnome-disk-utility should be available for Debian Squeeze (and is probably installed by default), and it allows you to connect remotely to a server and check on the status of it’s drives and RAID configs. It’s a really useful utility to have around. You can start it from the command line by executing “palimpsest”.

Probably on my end but my desktop cant show RandomC’s home page says “It Works! This is the default web page for this server. The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet.” Then on my laptop the whole site is back to normal. Maybe a bug or something?